Work & Ideas

Our economy is funded by businesses. That’s a fact. Businesses generate wealth, jobs, growth, and technology. They are the beating heart of the economy and essential to its survival. You only need to look at the failure of the Soviet experiment, or the way China has embraced business over the past twenty years, to understand that. In 2025, we have […]

In today’s world, there’s a lot of online business coaching, often emphasised on social media, that urges small businesses to adopt strategies from massive companies like Apple, Nike, Starbucks, NVIDIA, Tesla, and Google. The prevailing advice is to mirror these giants in hopes of achieving similar growth. But this approach is fundamentally flawed, and this post explains why. Many business

Too often, when I’m hired to build a brand, the client wants the logo to show what they do. This is a complete misunderstanding of what a logo is for. A logo is just an identifier. Its job is to be simple and distinctive, nothing more. Meaning comes from context. Put the same logo on a shoe and it reads

Charities are a force for good. I was a trustee of one myself. But that experience, combined with running businesses that get invited to a lot of charity events, has forced me to question whether all charities are actually valid in the way they operate. Take the cancer research centre in Guildford. No one would argue that cancer research isn’t

I’ve been running Yazaroo for several years, and it has been a success. We built a profitable business with a small team, focusing on brand design, web support, hosting, and website development. Most of our work was straightforward and steady, but every now and then, we landed large projects worth tens of thousands of pounds. These big projects were profitable

I spent about seven years building and maintaining the e-commerce website for a shop that sold a widely available consumer product. During that time, I was also deeply involved in marketing and provided strategic advice to help grow the business. The e-commerce function we built was designed for local SEO, allowing customers to find products and place orders for local

2025 marks the end of a six-year project I had with Neil Phillipson. We built a garden building company called Kani House, which started back in early 2018. At the time, Neil was already building astronomical observatories. We met at an expo, I was promoting Yazaroo and he was Outsideology. We were introduced by Karen who suggested that he would

Starting a business on a small budget demands low cost, but far-reaching marketing tactics. The most logical place is to start by creating evergreen blog posts. Information that provides tangible value to potential customers: people who are actively looking for a solution we provide in Google. It will come as no surprise that we are doing exactly that with Comus,

We have been building COMS for over a year. Initially, the system was entirely managed through PHP, lacking a graphic interface. This approach was deliberate; we aimed to test the concept and validate the market before committing significant time to a fully-fledged product. We built a bare-bones, essentially alpha, product and trialed it with one client, offering them a highly

Something I’ve learned over the years, working with lots of designers, and particularly young designers,  is that there’s a real obsession with perfection in the design world. In most creative agencies, everyone wants to produce the best work they possibly can, and they want everything to be absolutely spot on. I know a few agency owners (I won’t name them)

One of the key things I learned early on while developing Comus was something I really wasn’t expecting to learn. In fact, it’s something you’d never assume going in. We assumed that everyone we worked with would broadly share our vision, or at least understand what we were trying to build. What we actually found was that quite a few

So any logical person looking at the events industry at the moment would probably see an industry that is still trying to recover from the pandemic. An industry that is becoming ever more regulated with new legislation such as Martyn’s Law coming into effect next year, and an industry that is frankly under the boot heel of this terrible Labour

In August 2024, Alex Clarke and I had this great idea for a business. We would build a ticketing platform and make millions. It was so easy, so obviously a no-brainer that it couldn’t possibly fail. (Spoiler alert) It has not failed; quite the reverse actually. But fuck has it been hard. The bad We’ve been through quiet the storm.

For years, I used social media. I joined Facebook in 2007, and at the time, it was great: a place where my uni friends and I shared photos and stories from the night before. Facebook, however, has slowly descended into a mess as businesses and advertising have taken over. The goal is no longer connection or shared experience; it’s about